Introduction to the DCS Management Services Console

The DCS Management Services Console is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in interface that an administrator can use to manage and configure DCS services. The DCS Management Services Console lets you perform the key tasks associated with managing DCS services, such as specifying policies for services and operations, configuring services and tasks, specifying task filters, defining pipelines, and configuring discovery.

The DCS Management Services Console is an extensible client of the DCS management Web services. You can create a custom Web client interface to consume these services if required. For more information, see the section DCS Management Services Console Extensibility later in this topic.

To enable the DCS Management Services and the Management Services Console when you deploy DCS, you must select the Management Service and Management Console options on the Custom Setup page.

To access the DCS Management Console

  1. Click Start, click Run, type MMC, and then click OK.
  2. On the File menu in the Console1 window, click Add/RemoveSnap-in.
  3. In the Add/Remove Snap-in dialog box, click Add.
  4. In the Add Standalone Snap-in dialog box, under Snap-in, click DCS Management Services, click Add, and then click Close.
  5. In the Add/Remove Snap-in dialog box, click OK to return to the Console1 window.
  6. In the Console1 window, expand the DCS Management Services node to access the DCS Management Console functionality.
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MMC lets you save an MMC window layout for future use so that you do not have to add the DCS Management Services snap-in every time that you use it.

The DCS Management Services console is organized into several folders. The following table lists these folders and provides a description of each one.

Folder Name

Description

Configurations

The Configurations folder enables you to define custom configurations in the DCS Management Console. Custom configurations enable individual services to create a subset of the operations and tasks defined in the Management Services Console. This reduces the memory that the task-mapping cache uses. For more information, see Creating Custom Service Configurations.

Database Management

The Database Management folder provides a central point from which to configure DCS connections and to create new connections. For example, if you implement a server farm with multiple Discovery database instances, you can use this folder to manage the connection strings to those connections. For more information, see Managing DCS Configuration Databases.

Task Management

The Task Management folder provides a central repository of tasks exposed by the various services registered in DCS. The folder contains subfolders to segregate tasks based on their location, type, and status;

  • External Services – contains references to non-DCS services that your DCS tasks require. A task ticketer or pipeline can query the status of the external services that it depends on and take the appropriate action if an administrator indicates that a required external service is currently offline. For more information, see Defining an External Service
  • Ticketers – contains references to the ticketer classes that tasks can use to correlate requests with service instances. For more information, see Defining a Filter for a Task.
  • Pipelines – contains details of transparent pipelines configured to run when a task executes. Pipelines enable transparent workflow processes to execute when a client application sends a request message to a task, and when the task transmits a response message. For more information, see Configuring a Transparent Process.
  • Operations – contains details of DCS service operations registered with DCS. You use this folder to manage the tasks associated with operations, to assign ticketers, pipelines, and external services to a task, and to define task filters. This folder further divides DCS operations into configuration, generated, and notification operations.
    • Configuration operations are the operations that implement the DCS infrastructure, such as those associated with configuring tasks and managing services and operations.
    • Generated operations are the operations defined for user-defined DCS services.
    • Notification operations are the operations associated with sending and receiving notification events.

Discovery Management

The Discovery Management folder enables you to configure the discovery endpoint information for all services, and enables you to configure scope filters for individual service instances. For more information, see Configuring Discovery for a DCS Service.

Policy Management

The Policy Management folder enables you to add and configure policies for DCS services and operations. For more information, see Configuring Policies for Services and Operations


The DCS Management Services Console is an extensible Web service client that implements functionality that the DCS management services expose. It uses information in the dcsmanagementservices.mmc.config configuration file in the Program Files\Microsoft CIS\DCS\v1.0\bin folder to connect to the DCS management services. You can modify the contents of this file if necessary, for example, if you have to change the endpoint of the discovery service that the DCS Management Services Console uses, or if you have to reconfigure the bindings that the DCS Management Services Console uses to connect to the DCS management services.

You can also implement a customized user interface to replace the DCS Management Services Console with custom functionality. You can build a Web services client in any of the standard project types, including a Web or WPFapplication, that uses the DCS management services if your organization has specific business requirements.

The following figure shows how the DCS Management Services Console interacts with the Discovery database and the services implemented by the Management Services Web application.

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How the DCS Management Services Console interacts with the DCS management services

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